Increasing personalization in the medical field, including patient-specific structures. This drives a need for CAD models that conform to anatomical structures. This requires existing structures to be scanned into 3D, after which the model is built around them.

High reliance on clinical and animal testing of implants and other medical devices. Clinical and animal testing is costly, time-consuming, risky to patients, and can cause controversy.

Regulations require that all medical tools and processes must be validated, including the software used to design and manufacture medical devices. Using multiple software systems for design, validation, and manufacturing means more delays and expense to ensure regulatory compliance.

What if there is a better way?

Increasing personalization
Clinical testing
Regulation and validation
Use of scanned data
Virtual testing
A single system

By using a design tool that can easily modify scanned-in data, they can complete their designs more quickly and accurately

Conducting clinical testing in a virtual environment using an integrated CAD and CAE system saves a huge amount of time, money, and reduces patient risk substantially

Using a fully integrated design, simulation, and manufacturing environment means that there is only one system to validate.

How did we get here?

Combines facet, surfaceand solid modeling in a single system
Removes the costly, error-prone process of reverse engineering facet data
Enables new approaches like topology optimization to seamlessly fit into the design process
Supports the design of highly engineered complex new shapes that take full advantage of both additive and traditional manufacturing techniques

Convergent Modeling is a brand new modeling paradigm which greatly simplifies the ability to work with geometry consisting of a combination of facets, surfaces and solids, without the need for time-consuming data conversion. Convergent Modeling, the first technology of its kind, will help engineers optimize part design for 3D printing, speed up the overall design process and make reverse engineering a far more common and efficient practice in product design. It does this by bringing the scanned data in as facets, so there is no need to map surfaces, create solids, or do any other manual shape creation. You can scan your data and immediately begin building supports for 3D printing, creating molds based on the shape, including it in an assembly, analyzing it, or performing any other operation that you would with CAD data. Convergent modeling represents a huge savings in time and cost and eliminates the error-prone rework phase. For medical design, convergent modeling is a critical tool for creating facet shapes more quickly and with fewer errors than other solutions.=

Cutting_Block_Demo

Now let’s take a look at how Convergent Modeling makes medical device design fast, easy, and accurate. We start off by importing some scanned data, in this case, a knee bone. This file has some surface imperfections and errors, but we can convert it into a usable Convergent body anyhow. Now we will show the cutting block that needs to be modified to work with this particular knee bone. As you can see, this template part has extra material that interferes with the bone.

Since the cutting block and knee are separate parts, we need to use WAVE linking to connect them to each other so that we can use the knee as a reference for the cutting block.

Next, we need to create the offset surface that will be used to trim the cutting block. Since the knee is a convergent object, we can work with it just like with any other geometry, so creating the offset is easy. Once the surface is created, we decide to increase the offset distance to 1.5mm. This feature is fully parametric, so this is an easy change, as well.

Now that we have the new surface, we will use it to subtract material away from the cutting block. As you can see, the cutting block now matches the offset surface of the knee bone exactly. Changing the surface offset again, this time to 1 mm, updates the final part, as well.

Finally, we take a look at the two parts together to illustrate that the cutting block now matches the knee bone. SolidEdge ST10 has had the capability to do this type of design in the past, but it has never been this fast and easy to do.